The manufacture of such fluid-flow devices, and in particular such micropumps is based on technologies for micromachining silicon or any other micromachinable material, in particular using photolithographic techniques with chemical etching, laser ablation, microreplication, etc.
For the particular above-specified application, and also in other cases, it is necessary to provide an inlet control member that allows the micropump to be self-priming. The micropump is driven by varying the volume of the pump chamber (alternately reducing it and increasing it), e.g. by delivering drive from a piezoelectric actuator.
The European patent application published under the No. 0 453 532 describes such a micropump. Nevertheless, such a micropump does not provide its own self-priming since it presents large dead volumes, these volumes contributing to degrading the compression ratio achieved by the micropump.
In order to improve that aspect, a novel micropump has been developed, such as that described in the international patent application published under the No. WO 99/09321. In order to minimize dead volumes and in particular dead volumes downstream from the seat of the inlet valve, an inlet valve is provided in that pump that is thick in that said inlet valve constitutes the entire thickness of an intermediate wafer (or intermediate plate), the seat of the valve being situated on its side opposite from the moving diaphragm (or membrane). Nevertheless, such a micropump is complex in structure, difficult to manufacture, and still has dead volumes that are large.